AMD is at the heart of what’s expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the world. By the end of 2007, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin will launch "Ranger," with more than 500 teraflops peak performance (a teraflop is a measure of a computer's speed and can be expressed as one trillion calculations per second).
Built by Sun Microsystems and based on more than 15,000 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, Ranger will enable breakthrough science that has never before been possible. To deploy and support Ranger, the National Science Foundation awarded TACC $59 million, the largest award ever from that agency to UT Austin.
Each day, researchers at TACC work on extremely complex problems including earthquake prediction and simulation, climate modeling, weather forecasting, molecular science, nanotechnology and astrophysics. However, some of the largest problems could not be addressed or took too long to achieve useful results due to a lack of computing power. When TACC looked to expand its computing power, Sun came forward with a proposal to build servers that would include more than 15,000 Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors.
With the current TACC resources, researchers have access to as many as 5,000 processing cores, but when the new supercomputer is completed, researchers will have access to more than 60,000 processing cores – a huge leap.
But it’s not just the sheer number of available processor cores that will give TACC an edge. The new microarchitecture of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor performs more floating-point operations per second than previous generations, and with Direct Connect Architecture, improves overall system performance by eliminating traditional bottlenecks. This is a must for high-performance computing, where it’s essential that the technology used can "feed the beast" by moving information quickly from the memory to the processor. "By partnering with TACC, we have been able to contribute to a significant improvement in the resources available to researchers across the United States," said Tommy Toles, AMD Business Development Executive. "By using Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, TACC will not only be able to increase the computing power available, they will also be able to save on cooling and power costs."
TACC’s amazing new supercomputer, built on the game changing AMD64 technology, will allow researchers to look at problems they never dreamed possible before. "We are going to be able to provide a system that has no boundaries in terms of what users are used to," reports Karl Schultz, assistant director, TACC’s high performance computing group. TACC is one of the leading advanced computing centers in the United States, enabling and enhancing groundbreaking research in the sciences, engineering, and beyond. TACC supports computational research in all scientific disciplines, conducts leading-edge research and development in advanced computing technologies, and educates the public and the next generation of researchers about the role of advanced computing in research and society. More information on TACC is available at http://125.161.169.134/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.tacc.utexas.edu.
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